Vices and Virtues
by xcgirl08
Summary: There are seven chakras within every being, and seven things that block them. But what are the keys that open them? Seven lessons that Toph has taught Aang, because love makes us learn. Taang drabble series. EDIT: spoilers for 312.
1. Earth

I thought I ought to try drabbles more often, and this came to mind. There are seven chakras and the things that block them, but what precisely opens them? So, here we have those seven valuable lessons that Aang has known all along, courtesy of his blind earthbending teacher.

Avatar is not mine.

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_**The earth chakra is the chakra of survival. **_

_**It is blocked by fear.**_

Aang gripped the bars of the cage which held him, the metal cold and indifferent beneath his small, sweaty palms. Although he couldn't see her, he heard Katara call out after that strange little girl who knew, just as he did, what it was like to be torn in two. The waterbender was asking her for help, for the mighty Blind Bandit to aid them in saving him.

"_We need you!"_

Katara forgot that Toph was _not _the Blind Bandit now: now, she wore the mask of the fragile little daughter of the Bei Fong family, and all of that power was stowed away and hidden.

His breath caught, as the words reverberated over and over around the stone ring.

He knew no one would, could, do what Katara was asking Toph to do, just now.

She was asking that Toph reveal her secrets, remove that mask for her father to see what was underneath.

Aang knew that Lao Bei Fong was to blame for that guise. He was also to blame for that light in Toph's eyes, that look of a caged bird of prey, given just enough room to taste what the sky may be like before being called back. When a falconer notices this behavior, of course, he may clip the bird's wings, or discipline it until all the fight is gone and it is simply for show, a lifeless object on display.

"_She can't help you."_

Once the mask was gone, what would happen?

Katara was asking that this girl, this stranger whom he had just met, risk what meager freedom she had to rescue him. She was being asked to potentially sacrifice the one thing that kept her truly alive, and for whom?

Someone she did not even know.

_We need you. _

The whole world had needed him, had called out to him, and he had run away from his duties.

Aang himself had not been willing to make the sacrifices Toph was now being asked to: it had been far too frightening to imagine giving up the things he loved, his freedom, his _life_, for the benefit of a remote humanity and its concerns.

Even now he feared the surrender of such things, wondered if he would be able to do it if it was ever asked of him.

_Weak. _

_Can't. _

_Can't. Can't. Can't. _

The word that clipped wings and crushed worlds.

How could she face those doubts and fears that had overcome him?

He felt her fear in the silence that followed, as everyone waited for the girl to turn again and leave. It would have been so simple, so safe.

To be afraid and to face the fires anyway, as he would have to….

And then, suddenly, raw, fierce, and resolved, another voice crashed against the walls.

"_Yes. I can." _

_**And it is opened by courage. **_

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Next, of course, is water. Thank you for reading!


	2. Water

Next one! I own nothing.

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_**The water chakra is the chakra of pleasure.**_

_**It is blocked by guilt. **_

He had never said he was sorry.

The realization struck Aang like nausea as he sprinted into the iron belly of the monster attacking Ba Sing Se, leaving Toph outside. He could just barely make out her small frame through the hot dust and shadows, just barely hear her voice over the gnashing teeth of the machine, when the pang of conscience hit him.

He had never apologized for the angry, thoughtless words that had spilled out back there in the desert, surging up like magma and needing someone to blame for Appa's disappearance.

_Why hadn't she stopped them? _

_Why hadn't she come to get him?_

She had saved their lives. In Aang's mind, there had never been any question that she would, because she was Toph and that was just the sort of thing she did.

And he had never thanked her.

No, her only compensation had been his blame and fury. Aang had shouted himself hoarse at her, and _she_, the bold, fierce Toph, had not spoken a single harsh word in rebuttal. She had simply let him yell at her, dump all his blame and hurt on her shoulders.

He had never said he was sorry.

But she wasn't angry at him. She had punched his shoulder playfully after they crossed the Serpent's Pass, smiled and grinned as though the incident had never occurred.

And it was because she understood.

She understood that he was suffering enough without her own harsh words added on top of everything else, that his own guilt was repentance enough for the things he had said, and that she did not need to ask any more of him than that.

Aang threw one last look over at her, and she quickly faced him.

"Hurry up! _Go_ already, Twinkletoes, I've got you guys covered!"

She did.

She always did. There was never any question of it, just like there was never any question of her forgiving him, because that was _also _the sort of thing she did.

He had never said he was sorry.

But with Toph, he never had to.

Because she already knew.

_**And it is opened by forgiveness. **_

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Next up is fire! Thanks for reading!


	3. Fire

Don't own anybody, just in case you were wondering.

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_**The fire chakra is the chakra of willpower.**_

_**It is blocked by shame.**_

"Oof!"

That was really the only sound that the boy could manage, as he was knocked backward by the force of his own efforts once again, sent skidding in a spray of dust. Finally coming to rest about fifty paces from the stubborn boulder, Aang splayed his hands over his face and gave a sigh, flopping onto his back in resignation.

This was impossible, it really was.

No matter what he tried, that rock just plain refused to obey him. He braced himself for the verbal thrashing that was coming in a few moments, as he heard a steady pair of footsteps rushing over.

"And just what to you think _you're _doing?" barked a voice in front of him, when the footsteps came to a halt.

Yep, there it was.

Through his fingers, the airbender spied the familiar, sturdy feet of his teacher, set apart in a very military stance as she regarded him through her black bangs. He swallowed to wet his dry throat, and looked up into her blind eyes.

_How did she manage to make them so incriminating?_

"Well?" Toph prodded, leaning down to bring her frank voice closer to his face. He shied backward slightly.

Aang sighed. He had mastered basic earthbending several weeks ago, but now Toph had gotten the crazy idea of teaching him how to move rocks _without_ touching them, to shove them forward by the sheer force of his will, rather than having to grasp them first.

It proved much harder, to say the least. He lacked the natural connection with the earth, the feel for the rhythm and voice that Toph was always talking about in her sagely tone.

"Resting," the Avatar finally said. "This is really frustrating."

"Uh huh," she nodded, dropping down until their heads were level. "And why is that?"

Her tone clearly meant that she was fishing for a specific answer.

"Because….because….oh, I don't know. I just keep messing up."

That was the thing with earthbending, for Aang. Air and water had come so easily for him, so fluid and graceful in their similar motions.

Earth, however, had forced him to take everything he knew and flip it on its head, see the black as white and the white as black. It pulled his perspective and understanding outward to fit a new mindset and a new element, an element which worked in total opposition to his own. It was about finding harmony in disharmony, really.

He was used to things coming easily for him, used to understanding them.

This was different.

Toph flung her response back at him.

"Messing up, huh? Well _boo hoo._ Congratulations: you're human."

And that was another thing.

Aang was used to gentle nudges, the friendly critique from Katara, not Toph's blunt logic. Although there was no way she could have seen his astonished expression, the earthbender smiled as though she had.

"Huh?"

"You heard me, Twinkletoes. Mistakes are how you learn: You have to mess up a bunch of times and keep trying. If it's hard, that's a good thing. "

"Yeah, but…"

She waved her hands dismissively, shooing away his protests. "Yeah, yeah, I know, mister 'most powerful bender in the world'. But you're not always going to be perfect, got that? So get over yourself and try it again. You _are_ going to master this, if we have to be out here all night. "

She offered him a small, calloused hand and yanked the airbender to his feet so hard that he almost went flying right onto his face. However, Aang managed to catch and steady himself, and brush off.

And most of all, earthbending forced him to realize the value of mistakes, to understand how hard his pride was to swallow when admitting them.

But mistakes, as Toph had so tactfully told him, were going to happen in life.

So he just had to learn from them and move on.

Planting his feet in a powerful, resilient stance, the Avatar tried again.

_**And it is opened by humility. **_

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I have to thank Iroh for that one, really. Remember his lesson to Zuko in "Bitter Work"? Yeah. Thanks for reading!


	4. Air

**I revised this chapter. Spoilers for "The Avatar and the Fire Lord." **

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_**The air chakra is the chakra of love.**_

_**It is blocked by grief.**_

"Do you... really think friendships can last more than one lifetime?" Aang heard her ask, sounding surprisingly quiet and hesitant as she did.

His head was still reeling from the visions that had raced through it: The visions of Roku and Sozin, of the volcano spewing lava and black smoke, of a friendship broken and ripped apart for the sake of power.

But that is the lesson of humankind, he realized: that it is capable of both great good and great evil. There is always the temptation towards one, but the other provides the strength to resist and overcome it.

There is always the choice between the two.

As Toph spoke, Aang looked over at his friend… and was shocked. Her smoky green eyes were cast down, her face shadowed by unkempt bangs, her shoulders hunched: and for those few moments, Toph once again became the tiny little blind girl who had never had a real friend before, whose greatest fear was being alone and forgotten by the world.

And as he glanced over at her, scraps of other past lessons also filtered into his thoughts.

"_In the swamp, we see visions of people we've lost, people we loved: folks we think are gone…they're not. We're still connected to them. Death is an illusion." _

He heard her laughter dancing through the mists.

"_Love is a form of energy, and it swirls all around us." _

It was odd; Aang thought he would have recalled the rough earthbender who had taught Roku, when looking over at his current teacher.

Instead, he saw the face of a woman worn by a monster, whose features suddenly ran together with the one behind the bridal veil that a young Roku had lifted away.The Air Nomad's love for him, as the Guru had once said, had not left this world.

As he thought of the faces of those two women, he wondered if _their_ love had, either.

Perhaps there was more to the lesson Roku had given him than of good and evil...

"_Some friendships are so strong that they can last lifetimes."_

Because there was also the lesson that bonds break the barriers of time, they are never _really_ broken, no matter how much grief is felt: the connection between Roku and Sozin, between the Avatar and the Crown Prince, was still there. And so was the one between the Avatar, and woman he had loved.

_No matter how lost the connection seems, even if life, time, or tragedy says otherwise, it is still there. It can be found again, if fought for hard enough. _

But the thoughts of love did not bring Katara's face into his mind: and because that confused him, Aang forcefully pushed them out in order to answer Toph's question.

She was connected to him.He had not figured out just how, but that much, he knew.

And despite lifetimes of change and separation, she had found him again. She had returned to aid him, and had not abandoned him.

(_Life had given him a second chance_)

Aang thought that she should at least know that he would not abandon _her,_ either.

And so, bolstering himself up on her past lessons of bravery, he reached out and took Toph's rough little hand.

_It fit perfectly with his own, like two pieces of a puzzle reconnecting_.

She did not pull away.

"I don't see why not," he smiled.

**_And it is opened by hope. _**

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**A/N: Best moment EVER. That scene in the episode made me giddy. **


	5. Sound

**Next one, people! Spoilers for Episode Nine, "Nightmares and Daydreams." (That's right; I can even get Taang out of **_**that**_**. Behold my canon bending powers…)**

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_**The sound chakra is the chakra of truth.**_

_**It is blocked by lies. **_

_The lies we tell ourselves, to be more accurate…._But he certainly wasn't lying to himself now, was he? Aang did not think his brain possible of deceiving him any more than it already had in the past few hours….

His nerves were a mess. An absolute, undeniable, jumbled mess, starved of sleep and glutted on worry. After three days, of course, his reality and his dreams had started to run together like watery paints, creating a muddy world where Aang wondered what it was like to go insane (he would never look at Appa and Momo the same way again, that was for sure.) Rest would have put the colors back in order, of course….

But he couldn't rest.

He _wouldn't _rest, to be more specific.

Aang had refused to let himself sleep until this war was over. He was so, _so_ close right now that he could almost taste it, as bloody and bittersweet a taste that it was. And thus the metaphorical blade that was his confrontation with the Fire Lord inched closer to his neck.

_I'm not ready to do this_, Aang told himself over and over: because along with its proximity came its unbearable weight. Doubts overwhelmed him, and he feared failure more than ever now, the dark possibilities drumming on his skull.

He could lose.

He could fail the world again.

And above all, he could fail _Katara: _his loose tongue had almost confessed that she was his real reason for fighting, and it was only pure luck that saved him from pouring out his most embarrassing secret to her.

(Although for a moment after he had awoken from one of his nightmares, a terrible fear had invaded him as he remembered seeing a pair of empty sockets where green eyes should have been. _Your face, your face, oh gods who did this to you, I'm so sorry that I didn't protect you, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, oh please, please don't die….)_

So it came as no surprise, when the Avatar saw the fluffy bed sitting there, that he would write it off as another product of his deteriorating mental condition.

"Oh look", he slurred cynically, "Another hallucination. An imaginary bed made out of clouds."

He poked it, pushed his face against it: it sure felt real enough…

"HEY!" barked an instantly recognizable voice. "It's real! We spent hours making it for you!" Toph told him frankly, her arms crossed in their usual fashion as she addressed him.

His temper instantly flared, turning to his friends. Oh, so they were still pushing the whole sleep thing, were they? Easy for _them_ to say, wasn't it? _They _weren't the ones facing the Fire Lord tomorrow, _were_ they?

His mouth was working before he could stop it, all the worries spewing up like a geyser and turning into hot, garbled words that conveyed his panic, his fear, his doubts, all the things he had been telling himself lately. It was only when Katara's soft tone reached him that he took a breath at all, listening to her tell him that he was ready, that he had progressed and trained, that he could do this.

_That was Katara for you, though_.

She was always encouraging like that, and she had never doubted him for a second: even when it would have been better to have, when it would have been better to be harsh, to snap him back into reality. Same with Sokka, who chimed in with a smile at his doubtful friend.

But then, simply and unexpectedly:

"You're the man, Twinkletoes!"

For a moment, it stopped him absolutely dead, simply because he had not thought such words possible from _Toph_, of all people.

She had never, to his recollection, given him positive reinforcement of that sort before: it was always a sharp correction or a light insult, sometimes an approving nod accompanied by a few words of wisdom that just made him more frustrated, at the time.

And her harsher methods were always, in hindsight, for the better: He never would have learned earthbending otherwise, without that blunt, head-on approach that she took to everything.

...Which brought other words to his tired memory, of that first excruciating lesson with the blind girl: _You've got the stuff,_ she had told him.

_You're ready. Now do it! _

He had "the stuff." He had what it took to be an earthbender.

He had what it took to hold his ground in front of an enormous obstacle…. and he had the guts and ability to conquer it.

And the most wonderful thing about Toph's constantly, sometimes abrasively, honest words, was that he knew he could always, _always _believe her.

She would never sugarcoat anything, or water anything down for him.

All that Toph knew about him was the truth, plain and simple.

And here, now, she had just told him outright that she believed in him.

So if Toph could believe in him…

Then there was no reason why he could not, as well.

Sighing satisfactorily, his whole body slackening as it drained of three days worth of tension, Aang lowered himself into the soft bed.

"You know what?"

Another stifled yawn.

"I think I _am _ready."

_**And it is opened by trust. **_

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**Thanks for reading!**


	6. Light

**This contains spoilers for "The Western Air Temple", which aired in Canada. I'm sure you can find it somewhere….**

**I don't own anything. **

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_**The light chakra is the chakra of insight.**_

_**It is blocked by illusion.**_

Aang remembered being told that the greatest illusion humans entertained was that of difference. The four nations fought amongst themselves, divided by appearance, customs, mindsets and prejudice, and thus brother fought against brother.

The people of the world were really just one nation, under all the distractions. He was the Avatar, the four elements united in one body, and he should understand that better than anybody. Aang had told himself that he would live by that doctrine: told himself over and over again.

There was no such thing as a separation between people, because everyone was the same. Easy enough to understand, of course.

And yet Aang had never felt a distance more vast than the one between himself and the Fire Nation Prince standing five feet away. Really, he was still trying to absorb the prince's words…. _Pleas, more like_.

Zuko had just offered them his aid.

He was offering his services as a firebending teacher, to help them end this war.

He was offering to fight against his _father…_and for a moment, Aang glimpsed the hurt and confusion that Katara had spoken of. It had been healed over some, but the mark was still there.

He did not want to hurt Zuko any further. Some part of him wanted to reach out and welcome the lost traveler with open arms, assimilate him seamlessly into their mismatched family, act on his inquiry of friendship.

But there was another part of him, powerful and cold and vicious, that said Zuko could not be trusted: and after all the things the firebender had done to them, it was very easy to say which side of the argument was more logical.

Katara and Sokka were the same in their responses.

But Toph…Toph…

Toph had trusted him. She had vouched for him almost immediately, trying to clear the haze of past injuries away so that they could see the important role Zuko would play. _But why?_ Aang had instantly wondered.

Why was it so easy for her to trust his words, the words of enemies in general, and not face the same doubt that the rest of them did? Aang turned to look at her out of the corner of his eye, small and sturdy with her burnt feet propped up. She blinked those creamy jade green eyes slowly, patiently.

The answer came to him.

She was blind.

She was blind to differences in eye color, hair color and skin color: blind to the preconceptions that came along with the word _firebender, foreigner_.

She did not judge people for their past acts, but only their current ones.

Toph did not see the differences that the rest of them did, because all human beings were _alike,_ in her vision: they all had heartbeats. They all had hearts that could feel joy and sorrow and triumph and pain, that all beat with the same rhythm and the same life.

Toph saw only the unity and similarity between people.

She saw the truth. She saw that Zuko (_their brother_), in his honest words, was sincere in his desire to help them.

So, Aang concluded, Toph wasn't really blind.

("_Sometimes I wonder who the blind one is…"_ she had muttered before as she stalked away.)

No, she was the one who saw clearest of all: Toph simply saw without prejudice, and illusion had no hold on her.

So when he turned to his teacher first for approval in his decision, his decision to let Zuko join, he knew just what she would say:

"Oh, go ahead and let him…" she grinned.

Aang smiled back, even though she couldn't tell.

Opening his eyes through her own sightless ones, she never ceased to amaze him.

_**And it is opened by understanding. **_

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**Thanks for reading! I sure hope that the newer episodes air in America soon. **


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